


you know what the fear is like

by postcardmystery



Category: Elementary (TV)
Genre: Bipolar Disorder, Blood, Drug Addiction, Gen, Mental Breakdown, Mental Health Issues, Mental Institutions, Self-Harm, Suicide, Suicide Attempt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-16
Updated: 2012-10-16
Packaged: 2017-11-16 09:56:29
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 619
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/538232
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/postcardmystery/pseuds/postcardmystery
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Everything comes in cycles: a truth that is a thing that happens whether he likes it or not. He’s up and he’s up until he’s down, he’s down until he’s stable and he’s stable until he’s not.</p>
            </blockquote>





	you know what the fear is like

**Author's Note:**

> Trigger warnings for suicide, drug addiction, mental illness, and self-harm.

Here is a list of what he left behind in London: seven pairs of shoes, none matching, a sink rust stained by something that only  _looked_  like rust, seven atlases, a human femur, his lepidopterist Oxford tutor’s entire collection of (pilfered) rare butterflies, the works he kept hidden under his floorboards, walls papered with the entire Encyclopaedia Britannica, a shotgun he stole from his brother, two Christmases ago, nine pairs of padded cuffs, his father.

He was wrong about that last one, as it turned out.

 

 

New York is loud.

This feels like a hard-won truth, makeshift lockpick still in his hand and a shabby coat pulled tight over his hospital pyjamas, but he knows it to be merely a simple fact. It’s dizzying, after days and nights in what he can’t quite call a cell, but was, nevertheless, padded. The scars on his arms have healed. They are out looking for him, and they’ll find him when he’s good and ready. Today was his release day. What little they know.

He takes a long, hard drag on his cigarette, watches the sun rise, digs fingernails into his thigh until his skin only bruises a little, breathes in air of a city not his own, does not smile.

 

 

There is a mirror on the wall of his bedroom. He drags it down, knees it, goes back to sleep with glass slipped under his skin like a secret.

(Next morning, he cleans the wound, burns his sheets, hides it all away again. You think this is as simple as it looks, and that’s true, but this is a not a story about true things. This, like all life, is just a story about the things that happen when you weren’t paying attention, because those things are true whether you like it or not.)

 

 

He smells her before he sees her: the thick scent of her shampoo, the sharp stab of her perfume, the distinctive leather of her shoes. He does not tell her, of course. Some social lessons, even he has seen fit to learn, with time.

 

 

Everything comes in cycles: a truth that is a thing that happens whether he likes it or not. He’s up and he’s up until he’s down, he’s down until he’s stable and he’s stable until he’s not. He eats like his meal has done him a great dishonour and he doesn’t shave for days. He’d be naked if his brownstone wasn’t cold, and he’d never wash again if it wouldn’t make the police play at concerned. His fingers close over phantom scabs, tiny holes a needle was made to fit, were made to fit a needle, and takes his pills, smiles at Watson, does not let the truth get out.

His chest is raw and bloody, anyway, what’s a few more holes in his ribcage, around where his heart beats, where no hand will ever reach?

 

 

“You’re clean,” she says, a hundred hundred times, and he wishes he could tell her that you can’t clean out his mind, you can’t clean out this echoing, demanding beat, but he doesn’t have the words, can’t find the tone, won’t make the effort.

 

 

 _This is not about true things_ , he thinks, and she steps in front of him, a hand on his chest, pushing him back out of deadly New York traffic,  _this is about things which are true whether you like it or not._

“Steady on,” he says, and he can lie to himself, one more time, tell himself that he only likes the way she smiles a little, and not a lot, because this isn’t a story about true things, just things, just Watson, just this city, just no more scars on his arms.


End file.
